Google Says Glass Hype Was a Mistake

March 19, 2015

By Developer.com Staff

At the SxSW event this week, Google X director Astro Teller said the company shouldn't have released Google Glass so soon. "The bad decision was that we allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the program," he said. "Instead of people seeing the Explorer devices as learning devices, Glass began to be talked about as if it were a fully baked consumer product. The device was being judged and evaluated in a very different context than we intended — Glass was being held to standards that launched consumer products are held to, but the Explorer edition of Glass was really just an early prototype."

Other reports have said that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was behind the decision to release Glass before it was ready. The company has stopped selling the devices but says it is continuing to work on development.

Google had previously released development tools for Glass, but recent reports suggested that most mobile development firms had halted work on Glass-related projects.